Since conference season is in full swing, we thought it would be fun to play a word association game with some Inside Sales thinkers, writers & doers we met along the way.
We asked them to respond to the following: Sales, Marketing, inbound leads & outbound prospecting. Here is what they had to say.
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Pretty interesting stuff, no? I also found it really fascinating to hear the responses grouped together. So I edited another cut here:
Having Sales Reps prospect me is one of the most eye opening parts of my job.
Being a quant type of guy (nerd might fit too), I decided to track & categorize the sales processes that Reps have put me through over the last few weeks.
Here’s what I saw:
23 sales processes
13 sent a single email
6 added 1 call to the email
2 executed a generic 3+ touch process
2 executed 4+ touches (and sounded like they knew about my concerns & day-to-day role)
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By my math, that's a less than 9% of Reps doing something more than drive-by prospecting. This left me wondering, what is it that drives 1 Rep to commit to a process – where 9 others fall short?
Topics: sales process, lead generation, lead qualification
Over at For Entrepreneurs, David Skok (VC at Matrix Partners) shared a slide deck he presented at the Boston Lean Startup Circle on Building a Sales & Marketing machine.
The presentation covered:
What was most interesting for me was thinking about David’s presentation in light of a recent free trial of some SaaS software I just completed. Actually, I didn’t just complete it – I endured it.
But first to David’s points. Note: the deck is 124 slides deep – so I thought I might pick out a few and share my thoughts.
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Topics: sales process, lead generation
Yesterday I was extremely lucky to see Steve Richard, Vorsight’s Head Sales Prospecting Trainer, present at the Boston Chapter of the AA-ISP. The topic, "I can't get anyone on the phone" certainly had everyone's attention.
Steve led off with this question:
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He then shared the following metric from the folks at ConnectAndSell: 22
Based on millions of calls across all industries, and into small, medium & large businesses, the system-wide Connect Rate so far for 2010 is 4.5%. Or 22 dials for 1 connect with the person you are trying to reach.
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Steve laid out a series of factors that are contributing to 21 of 22 dials resulting in non-connects. Here are 3 points that really stood out for me:
Topics: sales tips, lead generation